Classic-On-Intel v 4.0.1: “chubby-bunny”

What ‘s this?:

COI is a application that gives Mac Intel owners the ability to run Classic (OS-9) programs. The environment has networking, quicktime, a OSX mountable 400/800/1200 Meg HDs for your applications and access from the OS-9 desktop to your boot volume. Unzip and place the application anywhere. This release overcomes the following limitations of Sheepshaver (in general) and previous versions of COI:

1) No installer necessary,
2) The Application can be placed anywhere (the “Utilities” folder is a nice place).
3) Blank HD’s for your old applications and data
4) Drag & Drop access to OSX
5) Includes the “NewOS” application so that you can replace OS9 with another OS (7 or 8)

(Any or all of the extra HDs must be put in “/Users/Shared” to automount in OS-9. Your /Users/Shared folder shows up on the OS9 desktop as “Unix”)

Stop reading here, click, install and enjoy

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or – if you really need to know.. read below or the other readmes from previous versions. Feel free to distribute this to other mac users as you see fit, I read the top “COI classic on intel” hits in google so if you have questions or wishlists, post them on one of those sites. If I had a way of making apple-legal happy I’d have a site and give this freely to the mac community, but for now...

gwalkabout

Notes:

1. COI will mount all of the following named volumes in “/Users/Shared/” automatically: 400Meg.dmg, 800Meg.dmg, 1200Meg.dmg, MyOldHD.dmg, COIHD.dmg.

2. COI is essentially Sheepshaver pre-configured and pre-installed with the highest version of os9 that it will run. Its main advantage is that it is a move-anywhere, zero-install, no-configure, “works out-of-the-box” version for people who have been using Macs because of their ease of use (but may not have the patience or ability to do a fairly complex install and configure procedure).

3. I love macs and have had them since 1984. My intent is/was not to violate any apple copyrights (see Rant below), so unless you are in the realm of “hacker” you will not be able to see, use or extract the any apple roms etc from this distro. Future versions will possibly have more extreme protection measures such as encrypting apple’s stuff and checking the machine gestalts to make sure you own apple hardware, check for an os9 instal CD, but for now...

4. Known problems/limitations: the network/appleshare functionality is limited by 9.04. I’ve removed printing and many/most of the features in os9 that are already available in os X – you can put these back in when you install your own os9 from your old mac (see below) – but remember, you should only use this for those few legacy apps in classic that have not osX equivalent (I had web-browsers, office

apps, multimedia, etc. in previous demonstration versions but what’s here is stable

and small).
5. The “NewOS” drag-and-drop application is needed to install your own os9 on

COI –Follow the directions below carfully. If you screw up it lets you undo and , of course, you can always unzip the whole thing again without screwing up your HDs in /Users/Shared.

Rant:

I’ll agree with others (many, it seems) that are disappointed that Apple didn’t see fit to include OS9 “Classic” environment capabilities in their Universal Binary OS for the new Intel macs. At best you can say that OS8 and 9 are actively-unsupported and restricted by copyright. I do have a nice collection of G5, G4, G3 and lower (PPC) macs in my house, lab and classroom some of which have software I paid big bucks for that don’t run on OSX (educational and scientific mostly). Bottom line: it’s a pain in the okole to dig one out, fire it up, copy screen-captures or files to my current mac and then print.

Tested on macbook, iMac, mac mini, and macbook pro.

Disclaimers and How to’s:

I’m assuming you have one last application on that old mac sitting on the corner that you

just have to run... that’s why I made this way to run os9 on your shiny new intel mac. (of

course you have licenses for os9 and a rom all this because it’s sitting over

in the corner, right?). My embedded OS9 is for demonstration purposes only, here’s

how you copy your own legal OS onto one of the new (blank) HD’s included with this version:

1. 1)  Copy your system folder from your old PPC mac (if you have to, take the old drive out, put it in an external enclosure, use disk-utility to make a fresh read- write disk image, copy it to your /Users/Shared folder. Yes, ... I had to do this with my Clam-shell iBook and 8500, so it does work.

2. 2)  Rename your backup disk image to “COIHD.dmg” and copy into the “/Users/Shared” directory.

3. 3)  Unzip and place one of the blank HD images (included) in your /Users/Shared folder. (COI will mount all of the following volumes in “/Users/Shared/” automatically: 400Meg.dmg, 800Meg.dmg, 1200Meg.dmg, MyOldHD.dmg, COIHD.dmg)

4. 4)  Run Classic-On-Intel, From inside OS9 you should:

   1. Copy your system folder, apps, documents, etc. from the “COIHD.dmg”

      volume to the blank one (the 400 meg should be good for most people).

   2. Open the system folder where you just copied it, then open the system and

      double click one of the sounds (then when you close it the system should

      be “blessed” and the folder icon should change to a system folder)

   3. Shut down OS9

5. 5)  Now copy the blank volume with your system on it into the same folder as the “Classic-On-Intel” and “NewOS” applications

6. 6)  Rename your (formerly blank) HD to “NewOS.dmg”

7. 7)  Drop the COI application onto the installer and ...

8. 8)  Done – you should now have a file called “OldOS.dmg” and a text file (that

   opened for you) with instructions for un-doing your OS upgrade.

9. 9)  Fire up the COI application.

10. 10)  If and First you don’t Succeed, Try, try, try, try.... Try again (and then give up).

    Most common problems:

    1. 1)bad extensions, 2)needs system enabler, 3)incompatible version (This

       will only run up to 9.0.4!!).

    2. You can correct most of these by undoing the install (with the NewOS

       application); mount the HD on the desktop; move most/all control panels and extensions into their respective “disabled” folders.

Note: FYI: I’ve had a rough time getting OS7.5 to run, but 8.6 and 9.0.4 run just dandy. If you have the unfortunate problem of only having 9.2.1 on your old mac (you upgraded religiously as per Apple’s recommendations), downgrade it by dragging the system and finder from the OldOS.dmg onto yours or do it from inside OS9 before you upgrade the OS to yours.

Version History

v.4.0.1 "chubby-bunny": Single-file, no-installer, movable. Now the application can be put anywhere (that is not protected by OSX) – so it can “hop around” your filesystem, but it is 100 meg, (hence the “chubby”),

v3.1 "nano": Now everything for OS9 is in the "COI" application (no additional files necessary). Provided is a blank 400Meg HD for you to install all your apps and files on (and, of course you can get really creative and have more than one of these for different legacy projects). If you crash the app by trying to install incompatible apps or system components, the installer has a "repair" feature (or you can just re-install the whole shebang -- after you BACKUP the 400Meg HD you just spent the last day loading your apps on).

v3 "pico" : =24meg. Limited functionality (used a bare minimum os 9.0 install with no "extras", apps, or fluff) -- you'll have to upgrade just about everything to run most apps. (for the hard core OS-9'ers).

v2.2 “final” =48meg. Has networking, appleworks, mounted OSX volume, and all the functionality of versions #1 and #2 above with a new installer -- when you're done there is only the application and the Classic disk image in your applicaitons folder (the rest has magically disappeared). Sort of my idea about mac functionality -- one click install = run os9.

v2.1: =49meg. I then really went about the job of selectively removing "fluff" that either wouldn't run or was already available in OSX from version 2 and started a rework of the installer(sorry, I took out text to speech and other fun stuff) ... which led to :

v2: =79Meg all good except for I crashed OS9 it a bunch of times trying to get nanosaur and bugdom to run... which messed up the HD disk structure so it gives you an alert in OSX when you mount the .dmg. (fixed in 2.2 +)

v1: =253 meg. the HD was bigger than it needed to be (erased free space on the HFS volume and deleted some apps, control panels, and extensions that crashed or were un- needed got me to ...